


A Good Man

by proxydialogue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Case Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proxydialogue/pseuds/proxydialogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock finally has that breakdown everyone has been expecting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Good Man

**Author's Note:**

> Archived from LJ. Orig pub: 1/3/2011
> 
> The title is taken from a quote of Lestrade’s in A Study in Pink. The story itself is, in some ways, an incredibly liberal rewrite of A.C.D’s The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot

_“…Sherlock Holmes is a great man. And I think one day, if we’re very, very lucky, he might even be a good one.”_

    
 _from the personal blog of John H. Watson_    
 _March 29 th, 2013. Last saved: 12:02 A.M. _  
    
That shite therapist of mine was always firm in the belief that writing would help me organize my thoughts and reestablish myself as a citizen in my own mind, to put to rest the solider. To her credit, she was wrong about everything else, and I feel no less a solider than I ever did, (although it may be my friendship with Sherlock that is to blame for that; “When you walk with Sherlock Holmes you see the battlefield,” said Mycroft) but my writing does, at the very least, help me to sort through events.   
    
I do not usually have any trouble with the order of events as they happened. I have a very good memory for detail, even if all my observations appear clumsy beside my friend’s. But somehow, this time, my process is failing me. I cannot recall the beginning. Every time I think back I find my memory begins with the breaking point, with the downward turn of events, the catastrophe. Every time, I think of Sherlock’s long fingers gripping tight in my hair. I think of the back of the pen knife tracing up my trachea, his voice like black silk in my ear.   
    
“Bored with  _you_ , actually.”   
    
It begins with my moment of disbelief. With fifteen seconds of doubt. Sherlock Holmes is not a machine. Or a sociopath. He’s a man. Extraordinary and brilliant, sometimes cold, but completely human. Probably more so than most people. I’m sure that he wants nothing more than to be exactly what he pretends to be. The belief of other people in those lies is the closest he can get. My memory begins in the fifteen seconds I thought I believed the lie.    
    
He made a mistake that broke the moment. He pulled my head back to bare my throat for the blade. I’d been shaking and dizzy, loose with adrenaline and the subconscious preparation to defend myself. I almost laughed in relief when I felt my head yanked back and the cold bite on my skin.   
    
He was cracking apart. I had to get him home. He certainly wasn’t about to come quietly.   
    
I punched him the jaw, and he dropped to the mud, unconscious.   
    
 _He’ll do things he’ll think you would find unforgivable._    
    
Everything is out of order. I’m exhausted. I would sleep and write this later but it itches like a new scab. I need to scratch it. I need to find the catalyst.   
    
Sherlock was poised before the fire in the cottage, watching me with feverish eyes. The envelope was in his hands. The firelight cast itself orange on his twitching fingers. “I’ll understand if you would rather not partake in this experiment.” I was hurling the door open, the sweet smell of the countryside after a rain no comfort to me. Things were in a cascade by then, unstoppable.     
    
“Sherlock, you promised me you wouldn’t die today,” I said desperately.   
    
“No. I promised you I wouldn’t die yesterday. However, I have no intention of dying today either. It’s unlikely that this will be fatal.” Sherlock tossed the envelope into the fire.   
    
The paper curled away and spit up wretched yellow smoke. The acrid smell of the poison hit me like a fist. It took hold of Sherlock like a claw. As my own vision began to swim away I saw him shouting wordlessly, pushing himself away from an imaginary terror, twisting and retching on the carpet. The smoke curled up in seductive tendrils, lapping at the ceiling. I was sinking into red sand. We were almost both lost to the hallucinations. Sherlock wailed.   
    
The sound sank teeth into my chest and brought me a moment of sanity. Sherlock was under the window tearing at his own face. I launched myself across the room and grabbed him around to waist to haul us both out the door into the clearing afternoon. We lay on the grass, gasping while the clouds broke above us. Beautiful baby blue behind the gray and white. My mind cleared slowly to the world. Sherlock’s wrist was clenched in my hand.   
    
He had stopped screaming but I could see the tracks on his face and hear the rasp in his breathing. I rolled onto my knees and knelt over him. He looked up at me in fading horror. “John?’ he choked. His hand reached up like it was going to anchor on me.   
    
He stopped it short, and then shoved me away. We were covered in mud.   
    
“That was an unbelievably stupid thing to do,” I snarled, angry and hurt.   
    
“No. It was a risky thing to do, and perfectly within my psychological profile.  _You_  are the stupid one for rooming with a psychopath and expecting him to magically turn into a normal human being.”   
    
I put myself on my feet.   
    
“So we’re a psychopath now? Bored with being a sociopath?” I had my back to him. I didn’t hear him move, there was a rushing in my ears. Then he had me, hand tangled in my hair, knife at my throat.   
    
“Bored with  _you_ , actually.”   
    
No. I didn’t go back far enough.   
    
A man knocked us out of our beds at eleven o’clock in the morning. An aging vicar, white faced, wringing his hat to an early death. He had a friend who followed, a wreck of a man, begging for our help, insisting that the devil was at work. His sister had been murdered in the night and his two brothers driven to madness. The maid had found them that morning sitting around a card table with their faces twisted into grotesque expressions. Mortimer Tregennis, that was the man’s name.   
    
Sherlock could hardly pass up the opportunity to outsmart the devil. He inspected the crime scene, four miles off at the manor of Tredannick Wartha, and walked back to the cottage without offering a word of consolation to the traumatized Mr. Tregennis. I followed, but I must have been walking too close, or staring too much because he suddenly snapped:   
    
“Do  _stop_ looking at me like I’m crumbling china, John! I’m not dying today, but when I do I’ll be sure to die alone to spare your sensitive disposition!”   
    
We had a late afternoon visitor, the same day, Dr. Leon Sterndale, an amateur collector of African poisons, who claimed a connection to the Tregennis family and inquired about the direction of our investigations. Sherlock was short and rude, and no more forthcoming than he had been that morning. Dr. Sterndale left us in a huff. Sherlock was dark and uncommunicative the rest of the evening.   
    
The next day the vicar returned to tell us that Mortimer Tregennis was dead. Killed in the same manner as his sister, found by the vicar himself in the very chair where his brother, George, had gone mad. We returned to Tregennis Wartha and found that the body had not yet been moved. Sherlock was delighted, but shaking from head to food under the stress of his own nervous energy. He put a great deal of importance on the antique lamp that sat on the card table. He borrowed a pen knife from the vicar and he scraped some white residue into an envelope from the talc shield on the top of the lamp.   
    
When we returned to the cottage Sherlock built up a fire in the hearth and I found myself gripped with apprehension.   
    
He stepped back a small distance and stood poised before the fire, watching me with feverish eyes.   
    
Again! I’m all mixed up! The very beginning! I must go back all the way to Dr. Agar.   
    
Dr. Moore Agar, a specialist in unique mental afflictions and anxieties, asked me pointedly to join him for brunch eight days ago. He had something to tell me, I knew. He was a nice enough chap, but like many of my readers and Sherlock’s clients, he was interested in me only as far as I was connected with Sherlock. Dr. John Watson, blogger, soldier, secondary extension of Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t insulted.   
    
He told me…Damn!   
    
Perhaps a few prefacing remarks are in order. This past spring had been extraordinarily busy. We were bombarded by case after case, and Sherlock, with his usual disregard for his own health, neglected utterly to allow himself a rest. For two months he worked almost nonstop. I haven’t even had the time write up the proper stories.   
    
I doubt I could remember them now. They blur together like overlapping pieces of mismatched stained glass.   
    
It was during one of those cases that we met Dr. Agar. He stayed in touch with me afterwards and, for both professional and personal reasons, kept up with my blog.   
    
“Convince Sherlock to go with you on holiday,” he told me when we had finished eating. “He’s heading for a breakdown if he doesn’t take some rest. And with his disposition and…personality, it won’t be a pretty thing.”   
    
“You can recognize the symptoms through the blog?”   
    
“You’re a very descriptive and accurate writer. A few weeks should be fine, and probably the longest he could stand to be idle. But it’s absolutely necessary to his health.” Dr. Agar made his career out of knowing the intimate functions of extraordinary minds, I was in no position to argue. And even a plebian such as myself could see how right he was. I agreed and thanked him.   
    
“If Sherlock does break down,” he added at the last moment, “he won’t be easy about it. And he won’t want your help. It’s likely he’ll do anything he can to prevent you from helping. He’ll push you away, he’ll be cruel, he’ll do things he thinks you would find unforgivable. He’ll want ruin before he wants your help.” Dr. Agar’s held my eyes intently. “But he’ll  _need_ your help, John. Don’t abandon him, if you can help it. Even if you can’t forgive him, don’t leave him.”   
    
His warning left me cold.   
    
I convinced Sherlock to go with me on holiday. It took six hours of intermittent pleading and arguments. He finally admitted he was subject to the whims of his body and if it failed he could hardly help but fail as well. We ended up on the Cornish peninsula near Poldhu Bay through the productive prying of Mycroft Holmes. He rented us a small lonely cottage we could never have afforded on our own, even with Sherlock’s occasional windfalls from grateful and wealthy clients. We spent one peaceful night before an aging vicar knocked us up the next morning.   
    
Mortimer Tregennis died the next day and Sherlock found the poison on the old gas lamp. He paused to look at me before throwing it on the fire. The pen knife he put to my throat was the one he’d stolen from the vicar. I punched him because I didn’t know how else to get him home.   
    
Mycroft got us home. He sent a cab, arranged for a private car on the train, and had a driver meet us at the London station. I had my medical bag with me, a new syringe hidden in the lining in anticipation of the worst, and a bottle of Ketamine that I still carried out of habit. It served to keep Sherlock asleep until I could lay him on our own sofa at Baker Street. The man Mycroft sent helped carry him up the stairs. He left without a blink or a question.   
    
I waited, shaking in my armchair, for the drug to wear off. I had to chase Mrs. Hudson downstairs with orders not to disturb us. The skull watched me stand in the middle of our living room, trapped in the indecision of whether or not to make tea.   
    
Ah. There. I’ve got it all in order now, I think. Dr Agar. Poldhu Bay. Mortimer Tregennis and the poison. The knife. Sherlock, drugged and pale on the sofa.   
    
We spend our lives telling stories to other people, it doesn’t seem right that it’s so difficult to tell the ones that matter. There is something stubborn in stories that come from the heart. The mind jumbles them all up. They aren’t linear, the important stories. Unless they’re lies. I think it must be kinder to lie. Kinder to the author, if no one else.   
    
Sherlock was groggy when he stirred. The look he gave me was hateful. I waited for him to speak, wondering how one explained away beating and drugging his best friend. It helped that he had tried to slit my throat. It made my excuses easier.   
    
“It seems a logistical mistake, bringing your attempted murderer back to your living room,” he observed flatly. The bravado of it was undermined by the trembling of his jaw and stuttering of his chest.   
    
“Our living room,” I reminded him. “And you weren’t going to kill me. You wanted to make me believe you had tried. You know more ways to kill a man than I do. I can’t believe you don’t know how to cut a throat properly. If you tip the head back the windpipe juts out and blocks a clean cut to the artery. It’s messy and ineffective, especially with a little pen knife.” He glared at me.  “The bastard might even live,” I finished with meaning.   
    
London buzzed on without us outside. The scent of Mrs. Hudson’s herbal soothers were floating up the stairway. In Poldhu Bay, a man was getting away with murder. And my flat mate had a purple swelling along his jaw.   
    
“You’re a fool. An idiot,” he hissed.   
    
“Yes, well. I’ve done dafter things.”   
    
“You really haven’t,” he promised.   
    
“I’ll get you some ice for that bruise,” I said.   
    
Every moment I expected him to run out the door or make a second attempt to hurt me. He didn’t. He lay still on the sofa in silence. Mycroft texted me every hour on the hour. I sent the same response over and over.   
    
 _He’s quiet._    
    
And Mycroft would reply, with a regularity that did nothing for my nerves:  _Watch him._  
    
I watched him like the world would end without him. I memorized every contour of his knuckles every muscle of his face. Sometimes he watched me back; glassy, unhappy. And I wondered what we looked like to the skull, our only outside observer, just sitting five feet apart staring into each other’s eyes.   
    
I must have dozed off. Still studying the color gray. It could only have been for a few moments, the hour had been about to strike the last I remembered and Mycroft didn’t miss his check in. I jerked up when the phone buzzed.   
    
Sherlock was still on the sofa, sitting up, watching me with calculations in his eyes. My army revolver was in his hand.     
    
“Shall we go for a walk?” he asked.   
    
We did. He kept the gun in his jacket and his hand in his pocket. He found a bench between the Parliament building and the Tate, along the Thames, that he liked. We sat there. He watched people go by. I waited for the next disaster.   
    
The weather always seems to make itself convenient to Sherlock’s plans. Or perhaps he makes plans convenient to the weather. That was a clear day. A Saturday. Children and groups of teenagers ran, biked, or rollerbladed up and down the walkway.   
    
“You are responsible for whatever I do,” said Sherlock. He had his eyes on a girl and her brother arguing over a plastic dinosaur. “That’s how you feel, isn’t it? Like you can help me recover from this breakdown you believe I am having. You believe you can forgive me for anything I’m capable of.” He turned and brought his hand to my chin in a gentle, carefully timed gesture. “You believe you love me enough,” he breathed “to always forgive me.” It would have been an ambiguous comment if he didn’t have my face in his hand.   
    
I denied nothing. I had known he would bring it up eventually. It was the only secret he had never called me out on over our three years of living together. He used it cruelly now, brushing my cheek with his thumb, softening his gaze.   
    
“You don’t know what I’m capable of.” The words were designed to sting. And they did. All the time I spent not brushing his shoulder, not straightening his collar, not staring when we sat watching telly together. I shrugged it off with an effort and continued as calmly as I could.   
    
“I’m not leaving,” I said in case, on some level, it was what he needed to hear.   
    
“What happens next is your fault,” he informed me. Then he stood up and took a few steps away from our bench. There was an older man in his early sixties leaned against lamp post. He was watching the girl and her brother play. His tan faced was relaxed and peaceful. He wore a beige sweater that was frayed at the sleeves and ripped in two places. There was a scratch on his neck. His hair was gray and brown. He wore wire frame glasses with the frame bent. He was a poor man.   
    
Sherlock shot him in the back.   
    
People must have screamed. That street must have been pandemonium, chaos, but I didn’t hear anything after the bang but the rationalizing in my own head.  _There’s a reason_ , I repeated over and over, moving mechanically to get us out of there.  _There’s a reason._  I took the gun from Sherlock, who didn’t fight it. I walked us home with my hand under his arm, steering him. A police car passed us on the street. I opened the door quickly and snuck him up the stairs before Mrs. Hudson came out, asking questions.   
    
 _There’s a reason._  
    
 _He’ll want ruin before he wants your help._    
    
Mycroft arrived before the police. God knows what he thought of what he saw when he walked through our door. Sherlock was lounging on the floor with his back against the sofa, humming a symphony to himself. I was making tea and pulled down a third cup when Mycroft arrived.   
    
“Tell me who he was,” Mycroft demanded. Underneath his professionalism he was furious. He was shocked.   
    
“An innocent man,” said Sherlock.   
    
“I think not.” Mycroft’s voice was clipped and harsh. I thought he sounded more like a big brother than I had ever heard him.   
    
I watched the kettle boil and fiddled with the sugar spoon. Illusions, I thought, were everywhere. Pain was an illusion, it only existed so that the body could know when and how to protect itself.  In Afghanistan, during a week when the medical supplies came late, I’d seen a hypnotist convince a man who’d had his foot blown off that he was in no pain at all. The brain controlled everything; pleasure, agony, just electrical impulses. The spoon too, I noticed, could be the subject of illusion. All I had to do was hold it correctly and wiggle it enough and it appeared to bend. A trick Harry had taught me when we were kids.   
    
So many things. Just illusions.   
    
“You  _want_  not,” Sherlock corrected his brother. “You  _hope_  not. And you’re an idiot for both.”   
    
“I have known you longer than you have known yourself, Sherlock. The privilege of being the older sibling.”   
    
“Hah!”   
    
My own pain had been an illusion. A psychosomatic limp. PTSD. Was Sherlock’s pain an illusion? I couldn’t know, he wouldn’t tell me where it hurt.   
    
The tea was boiled, I brought Sherlock a cup. He took it from me, surprised.   
    
“I think I’ve busted the dog,” he said to his brother. I shook my head and sat down beside him on the rug, indicating the third cup was for Mycroft, if he wanted it.   
    
“I pray you haven’t,” whispered Mycroft, “because if you truly want to destroy yourself, the fasted way would be through him.”   
    
“The dog has a name,” I reminded them calmly. “John Watson. He’s even got a medical degree.” I sipped my tea. It tasted wonderful. Strong, no sugar.   
    
“Leave, Mycroft. You’ll only implicate yourself if you stay. Leave me to the police. No more worrying about troublesome Sherlock. You can focus on fixing the country. Think how nice that will be.”   
    
“A pitiful attempt, Sherlock.”   
    
My revolver was still in my coat, which was heavy in the warmth of our flat. I took it off and tossed it into my chair. The weight of the gun made it bounce oddly. It was one bullet lighter. A negligible mass, comparatively.   
    
Illusions. The old man crashing to the pavement, a bullet hole in his heart. Sherlock wasn’t a bad shot. There would have been very little pain. But blood was all over his beige sweater.   
    
Dead. That was no illusion. Death was the only real thing maybe.   
    
All at once I could hardly breathe. I was going to fall apart. I remembered Sherlock, years ago, asking me to demonstrate what I’d learned of his methods on a pair of trainers, with pride in his face. And I remembered Sherlock, moments ago, inexplicably gunning down an old man. I couldn’t synthesize the two. I dropped my tea, it spilled everywhere and pooled hot beneath my legs in the carpet. Sherlock’s hand was cool when I grabbed it. I was burning.   
    
He jumped as if I’d stung him when I took his hand.   
    
“John!” he barked.   
    
“Tell me there was a reason,” I begged. “He was a murderer or something. Please. Sherlock, tell me you didn’t kill an innocent man.” I folded his hand in mine. I spoke softly, as if he were a child. His fingernails were perfectly trimmed. “Tell me what it was.” My eyes were tearing up. I would panic soon, I was past my threshold and it would all be over if he didn’t speak.   
    
Someone bashed open the door downstairs. I rose, mindlessly prepared to fight off the entire police force.   
    
It was Lestrade, alone, that burst in.   
    
“Tell me it’s not true,” he gasped when he saw me. He wasn’t wearing his badge or his coat. He was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, the call had come to him off duty. My expression told a story he didn’t want to hear. He wiped his face with his palm, looking green. “Oh, God.”   
    
“Inspector,” Mycroft interrupted sharply. Of all of us only Mycroft was put together. The kitchen was a mess behind him, but he was a straight line of symmetry. “I’m afraid you have to make a difficult choice very quickly.” Mycroft crossed the room and shut the door. “I will explain everything I know to you, which admittedly is not much, but we haven’t the time now.”   
    
“Why would he shoot…in broad daylight—!”   
    
“We don’t know.” I told him. Sherlock was silent on the floor.   
    
“Don’t know! You don’t bloody—what on earth sort of choice do I have!”   
    
“Sherlock or Scotland Yard,” said Mycroft. Lestrade looked desperately between the three of us. Whatever he saw in Sherlock couldn’t have been comforting; the idiot sipped his tea and didn’t say a word. I was still holding his hand, a damning piece of evidence for other reasons. Lestrade could see he was missing nearly all of the facts.   
    
“Sherlock wouldn’t do this without a reason,” I mumbled, not very helpfully.   
    
“Why doesn’t  _he_  explain!” Lestrade cried. Then his mobile was going off and there were sirens shrieking down the street. “ _Hell_.”   
    
I was amazed. Lestrade didn’t hesitate. He threw my coat at me, knocked Sherlock’s tea from his hand and all but kicked us down the stairs. “Out the back,” he ordered. “Throw out your cell, John.”   
    
“Give him this one,” put in Mycroft. A chunky black plastic mobile was stuffed into my hand.   
    
“Mr. Holmes will contact you. RUN!”     
    
We ran. I pulled Sherlock along behind me and, thank the Lord for small miracles, he didn’t make it difficult. I grabbed the first taxi I saw and took us east, to the underground, the only place I could think of where no one would ask questions.   
    
Who would go looking for the great Sherlock Holmes in a den of untouchables?   
    
I hadn’t been there myself since that first year with Sherlock, tracking down the Golem. But it wasn’t a hard place to find. The smell was a beacon if nothing else. Trash and puddles littered the tunnels. If it had changed at all since three years ago I couldn’t tell. That could have been the same McDonalds bag, the same peppering of used fags. It was absolutely the same freezing damp. I took us into the tunnels and turned and turned until I could only just remember the way out. Sherlock had become mysteriously like a dumb child. He followed obedient and blank.   
    
We weren’t properly equipped to stay outside. I had chucked my phone out the window of the cab, Sherlock’s too, but the mobile Mycroft had given me sat distressingly silent in my pocket. We stood together in the darkness, breathing.   
    
At length he made one decision for me and sat down in the filth. His arms curled up to hide his face and his knees propped him against the wall.   
    
“Sherlock,” I whispered “will you talk to me?”   
    
He wouldn’t. But he was shivering. I sat down beside him,  _almost_  indifferent to the smell and the cold and the wet, and put my arms around him. I would keep him as warm as I could. He didn’t push me away, thankfully, he didn’t react at all. He was a stringless puppet. I pulled him against my chest and hoped he would forgive my indiscretions later, if we got through this somehow.   
    
Even in the midst of a breakdown Sherlock was immaculate about his grooming. The scent of his shampoo was a gentle comfort in that grimy place. The back of his neck was warm. I rested my face against it and started talking to him to fill the silence, to quiet the panic in my chest. I told him everything about myself that I had never told him before. I told him everything about Afghanistan. I told him about every girl I’d ever loved and every friend I’d ever lost. I told him Harry’s story. I told him my story.   
    
When I ran out of things to tell him about me I started to tell him about himself.   
    
 _He’ll need your help, John._    
    
“I don’t think anyone is really fooled, you know,” I said carefully. “Even Donovan, I think, knows you can’t really be a psychopath.  Psychopath’s blend in to get what they want, they lie, they charm people. You hate the bother of lying. You think it’s a waste of energy, convincing people to like you.   
    
"But…I don’t think anyone understands you either.” I breathed against his nape and ran my hand down his shoulder, in case he was listening, in case he was comforted by it. “I don’t understand you. And I’m very sorry for it. It must be something obvious. Isn’t it? You’ve got a Tell, and you’re amazed that we don’t see it. There’s one thing about you that explains everything, that proves it’s all really very simple if we would just  _observe_.” I couldn’t tell if he was listening or not. “And we just disappoint you every day.”   
    
I talked and held him and we waited in the dark to be saved.

I had drifted off again when the phone finally rang. _Christ_ , I thought _, when all this is over I’m going to need a coma to recover._  It was disorienting, waking up in the dim light, freezing, numb and wet, with something warm in my arms and someone’s hair in my face. I squeezed whoever I was holding in brief panic and heard his waking breath.   
    
Sherlock.   
    
Mycroft was calling. I used my right hand to fish out the phone, the ringing was hideous in the quiet.   
    
“Finally!” I grumbled into the receiver.   
    
“I’ve sent a car, it’s waiting for you,” no apologies forthcoming.   
    
“How did you find us?”   
    
“Your imagination is sadly predictable, Dr. Watson. We are fortunate Lestrade is on our side or else Gregson would have tracked you down as well. The inspector fed his colleague a red herring and is investigating the dead man as we speak. Get in the car.” he hung up. I put the phone back in my pocket and started to unfold myself. Sherlock was not immediately cooperative.   
    
“Come on,” I huffed at him. “We need out of this cold and I can’t bloody carry you all the way.” He stood up and waited for me, eyes focused far away. I led him by the hand again, on my screaming feet (at least the pain meant there was no frostbite) out of the tunnels and to the closest road. A black car was idling on the street. We got in the back and the driver pulled away without a word.   
    
I don’t know where I expected to be taken. Some abandoned but sufficiently warm ware house on the outskirts of London. But when we stopped we were in a back street parallel to Pall Mall. The driver directed us through a back door, where Mycroft himself was sitting and rubbing his temples on a window seat. He stood quickly when we entered.   
    
“Ah, there you are. Bring him upstairs, it’s warmer.”   
    
“Housing fugatives, Mycroft? That can’t be healthy for a government official.” Mycroft smirked at me, the Holmes family smirk.   
    
“Consider me a government unofficial then. I almost never appear in the official channels unless I’m budgeting.” He turned and led us up a carpeted flight of stairs. “And for better or worse, Sherlock is my brother. I’ve bent the law more than once on his account.” The carpet was a soft burgundy color. All of the furniture was a deep, rich, brown. The library was a place I would like to visit on a more leisurely basis, if occasioned. I don’t know if Mycroft is as voracious a reader as his collection suggests or if he simply likes the way the books fill the walls.   
    
Mycroft settled us in and gave us dry clothes to wear. Sherlock was a ghost against the deep red of the settee we put him on. He refused any offer of drink except for the brandy I order on him and of that he would only take two sips. He would not look me in the eye, but it appeared he was done fighting. Mycroft regarded him thoughtfully from his own chair by the fire.   
    
“Is there anything I can get for you, Sherlock?” he asked. Sherlock waved his hand in a vague way, weakly, from beneath the blanket I had covered him with. Mycroft glanced at me with a tragic face. In the next few minutes Sherlock either fell asleep from exhaustion or pretended to in order to avoid us for a while longer.    
    
A maid appeared in the doorway and Mycroft followed her out. I stayed, thinking about Sherlock and beginning to drift gently myself, when I heard a male voice boom from downstairs.   
    
“You’re instincts are better than Sherlock’s, Mr. Holmes! You couldn’t have been more accurate if you’d drawn me a bloody map!” It was Lestrade, I realized when the world swam wearily back to me. I heard Mycroft’s softer response in return.   
    
If Lestrade was calling, then he had found the answer to Sherlock’s murder. His voice didn’t suggest the worst. My body begged me to slump back into the warmed cushion, but I had to know. I yanked myself from the chair and paused only once in the doorway to wonder about the wisdom of leaving Sherlock alone. Mycroft would not have anything dangerous lying about, I decided in the end. And I would only be down the stairs.   
    
I only actually made it half way. My feet were very quiet on the carpet with no more than my borrowed socks on my feet. I rounded to the top of the staircase meaning to rush down and demand Lestrade repeat his findings for me. Mycroft’s tone stopped me. It was private and uncertain. I had stumbled into a strange moment.   
    
Turning around would have been the decent thing to do. Instead I crouched low on the stair, putting myself in the shadow of the banister, and listened over the sound of my own breathing.   
    
“None of this ‘Mr. Holmes’, inspector. If we’re going to be co-conspirators, Mycroft will do.” I heard Mycroft’s halting sentence. Lestrade answered in an equally odd voice. Two fish out of the sea.   
    
“Geoffrey, then. Oh, thank you.”   
    
“I assume it’s the least you need.”   
    
A short silence, then I heard Lestrade cough.   
    
“My God, if I’d known you were giving me the Queen’s brandy I wouldn’t have had it so fast.” The crystal sound of pouring liquor and Mycroft’s dark chuckle. Many things about Mycroft were dark. But they were also sturdy.   
    
A long, agonizing silence.   
    
“I want you to know that I appreciate the difficulty of the choice you made. And I’m grateful for it.” Mycroft’s voice. One of them sat down. “Thank you.”   
    
“I’m not sorry,” Lestrade said quickly, then, as if realizing that wasn’t quite the proper response: “and it was no choice, really.”   
    
“It was no choice to trust, in a second, a sociopath and his misanthropic older brother?” Mycroft was either amused or in disbelief.   
    
“I’m no expert, of course, but I would say that Sherlock’s…funny ways, aren’t the result of social ineptitude.”   
    
“No indeed.”   
    
“…How is he?”   
    
I went back to the room, and to Sherlock, before Mycroft could answer. I was afraid to hear what he had to say.   
    
Lestrade must have stayed talking for some time because I fell asleep before Mycroft returned. I wouldn’t have made the mistake again if we’d been anywhere else, but I assumed Mycroft had everything in hand. And I assumed Sherlock was done punishing me.   
    
In the end, I never learned the truth about the old man from Lestrade at all. I learned it from Sherlock, who was sitting in the light of the rising sun fiddling with a vile of morphine and a needle when I woke. His scarf was wrapped around his upper arm and his forearm was bared. The steep angle of the light threw his veins into contrast, the needle was held comfortably, familiarly, in his right hand.   
    
I sat upright with a strangled cry. Sherlock looked up at me with a drawn face and red eyes, his pupils were normal.   
    
“Don’t worry,” he set the needle on the floor and leaned back. “I’m a coward after all.” He sounded so much like his old self in that moment, so derisive. And so much unlike he had ever sounded, turning his scathing criticism in on himself.   
    
“Sherlock,” I was up and gripping his shoulders, beside him on the settee. “Whatever else is true,  _that_  is  _not_.”   
    
“Stop! Lying!” he commanded. “What else do you call a man who hides from everything? Who hides from himself? I am a hypocrite, too. How often have I accused you of being biased to the facts?”   
    
“No. Cowards don’t chase down assassins in the dark. Or battle evil masterminds. Or do any of the very insane things you do on a regular basis.”   
    
“Hah! Assassins! Masterminds! Death, pain. All threats to the body. What is the body? Nothing. I risk, nothing.”   
    
“You risk  _everything._ ” I hissed at him. “And if you believed otherwise you would have vanished to somewhere else by now.” He was drained suddenly, in the golden light of the morning. Emptied like a glass tipped over. He slumped forward into himself, cradling his head in his hands. He peered at me from behind the veil of his fingers.   
    
“Why are you still here, John?”   
    
“Why are you still trying to drive me away?” I returned.   
    
“Even if you stay,” he said softly “you will wait forever for me to change. I won’t.”   
    
“I’m not asking.”   
    
He nodded, and turned to look behind him at the rising sun. A day without rain was rising in London. It was a day for walks and shopping. It was a day to drink tea with the windows open, or to take lunch in an open bistro. It was going to be a beautiful day. For anyone who stood in the right spot nothing evil could possible happen today. Nothing wrong. The world would be at peace.   
    
“He was a murderer and a rapist. Young girls. Julie Wilcox, the girl who was taken from her mother’s van near Picadilly two weeks ago, was not his first victim.”   
    
It was one long blank second before I found his meaning. My stomach twisted in rage and revulsion. The details came together in my memory, little things blooming into grand and horrible significance. The bent wire of his glasses.   
    
“The tear in his sweater and the scratches on his neck.”   
    
Sherlock nodded.   
    
I left my seat and crossed the room to yank the curtains together. I shut out the glorious, lying morning.   
    
Sherlock lay down on the settee and I scooped up the morphine and the syringe. I would dispose of them downstairs.   
    
“You should get some sleep if you can,” I said and turned to leave. The needle was freezing in my hand. I wanted it gone. I had doubts that morphine had been his drug of choice as an addict. And the volume in the syringe was suggestive. Sherlock hadn’t been looking for a high.   
    
“I hate it, you know.” His voice stopped me in the doorway, low and singsong.   
    
“What’s that?”   
    
“Being Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Great Detective’. I hate seeing what I see. I hate knowing everyone’s dirty little secrets.”   
    
“No you don’t,” I argued. “You hate that the things you see when you look are dirty. You hate that humanity can fool everyone but you.”   
    
“You may be right,” he said, and dropped off to sleep.   
    
I folded the syringe and the morphine into a wad of paper towels and smashed them to bits under my foot before throwing the shards away. Where had he found them? Where was Mycroft to stop him?   
    
Where was Mycroft at all?   
    
“At the office,” he told me later. “It would be a mistake to vary my routine while breaking the law as I am. There is already suspicion of my involvement I’m sure. Changing my schedule would only draw attention. How is Sherlock?”   
    
“He’s been sleeping for hours now. I don’t think he’s better, necessarily. But he spoke to me at least. Told me about the man he killed.”   
    
“A particularly nasty specimen of our species, Lestrade informed me.”   
    
“And the law?”   
    
“Sherlock’s a hero, as far as the media will be concerned. He prevented a second abduction. Lestrade’s men also found a concealed weapon on the body. Obviously Sherlock saw it and believed the man was reaching for his gun and fired first.”   
    
I thought about the thin material of that beige sweater. It couldn’t have concealed a breadknife.   
    
“The gun was unregistered, of course,” Mycroft added without a hint of insincerity.   
    
“Of course,” I agreed.   
    
“You are both free to return home as soon as he wakes.” He paused. “Or you may stay, if you wish,” he added softly. I had a funny vision of Mycroft twenty years ago when he was nothing bigger than a big brother.   
    
“What happened between you and Sherlock?” I asked before I could think not to. Mycroft regarded me in surprise. There was a grandfather clock that ticked behind him.   
    
“There is something extraordinary about the “ordinary” people Sherlock chooses to surround himself with. Clever in unexpected ways, both of you.”   
    
“Both of us?” He was handing me a very full glass of very expensive brandy. I allowed myself to be diverted temporarily out of gratitude. The brandy went down like fire and silk.   
    
“Lestrade.” Mycroft clarified, “I wouldn’t call you sensitive, exactly, intuitive is a better word. Very intuitive. Especially in manners concerning my brother. For which I am grateful.”   
    
“I seem to have done little good for him lately.” Sleeping, Sherlock was long worn out lines and shadows on the settee upstairs.   
    
“You’ve done him more good than I have been able to in these past years,” Mycroft assured me. He poured a third glass of brandy and set it on the server. “This isn’t his first breakdown, John. They come irregularly, whenever he works himself too hard for too long. In the past he turned to chemical…solutions.”   
    
“He didn’t turn to me. I had to kidnap him.”   
    
“But he didn’t disappear.” I nodded. And then I was done with wondering.   
    
“What happened to him that you couldn’t stop?” I asked. “He’s up there making it out like he’s suffering because he can see all the evils of the world. Like all of this has been about existential angst. I don’t doubt it’s difficult but…”   
    
“But..” Mycroft echoed.  “It wasn’t something I couldn’t stop, it was something I did stop, and I fancy he hates me for it. Quite rightly. Come in!” he shouted. I jumped and nearly sloshed expensive brandy all over myself. The door to the parlor swung open. I hadn’t heard a knock. Lestrade walked in.   
    
“Mr. Hol...er..Mycroft. John.” Lestrade nodded his head. “The media is in a frenzy and the charges are dropped. Donovan and Anderson have gone home to drink away their disappointment.”   
    
“And you are here,” Mycroft smiled, “in the last house where you have no secrets.” I thought it was a strange thing to say. He handed Lestrade the third glass. Lestrade laughed.   
    
“Don’t go imagining I gave up all that much.” he said. “My own mother hasn’t known me since I was twelve.”   
    
“What on earth did you do when you were twelve that you couldn’t tell your mother?” I asked.   
    
“Saw my neighbor strangle his wife. She would have been horrified if she’d known. My mother has the constitution of a cream puff for some things. I begged for hours before I convinced the local constable to keep it quiet,” all said without hesitation.   
    
“You know you’re trusting the second most dangerous man in London with your secrets,” I said to Lestrade. He shrugged.   
    
“Seems he would know them either way. Trusting him saves the trouble.” . I looked at Mycroft, who was smiling warmly into his drink. I felt bizarrely like a young man who had walked in on his parents having an intimate moment. “How is Sherlock?” he asked me.   
    
“He’s speaking to me again. But I don’t…I don’t really know what to do for him.”   
    
“You’re under informed,” said Mycroft. I understood it to mean that Lestrade was to be privy to this information as well.  _It’s only right_ , I reasoned. He’d risked his entire career for Sherlock. More.   
    
The step didn’t creak. And the hallway was dark so there couldn’t have been a shadow to notice. I only suddenly knew to glance up, to lean back just enough to see between a gap in the rails of the banister to the top step, where I had overheard a conversation the night before. Sherlock was sitting there, pale faced, in a red dressing gown that was too big for him. He was looking at me. He was listening. His face told me if I didn’t stop it, something was about to break.   
    
I took a large swallow of my brandy and let Mycroft have his say. Sherlock would forgive me or he wouldn’t.   
    
Mycroft looked at his brandy and at Lestrade, not at me. I had given it away somehow. But we were in mutual agreement. Get it all out in the open, like a deck of falling cards.     
    
“It was our father. We came from some money, in our childhood. Our father was a retired army colonel and the enterprising business type; a gambler. Not in cards or games, bigger stakes, business risks. When Sherlock was ten the money began to run out. Mother and Father never said anything, but we were clever enough to notice.” He gave Lestrade an almost self deprecating smile. “Father started disappearing for months at a time. He would leave and come back with instruments and chocolates from Spain, for Sherlock and myself.”   
    
“In 1979 El Salvador broke out in a civil war that lasted for thirteen years. It hardly made the press here for the simple reason that we were not really involved. But my father had friends in the Salvadorian government. And when the Liberation movement began, he threw in with those friends and used his influence to get them…supplies they would not normally have had access to.   
    
“If you have heard anything of the war, you’ve heard of the atrocities committed by that government. Concentration camps were set up to house captured liberals. Children were murdered for  _sport_  by government soldiers. Women were raped. On a day to day basis this went on. All under the eyes of watchful colonels. My father was one.   
    
“He was not only guilty of inaction, but he supported the camps with funds. He condoned them. Sherlock discovered it.” Mycroft paused and took a large sip of his brandy. There was a small tremor, just a tiny one, in the line of his jaw.   
    
“He wanted to tell Mother. He wanted to expose Father publicly to the British officials so they could have no choice but to act. I stopped him. Our mother was not a weak woman, much to the contrary, but she loved our Father and it would have broken her heart. I told Mother a lie about Sherlock to get them both out of the house. A year or so before Sherlock had fallen sideways through a window on the second floor and cut his arm badly. I told Mother that Sherlock and I had broken the window on purpose that day and fabricated the story of him falling through it so she wouldn’t know that the wound was intentional. I told her Sherlock had tried to kill himself and I was afraid he was thinking of making another attempt. I had never lied to her before, about anything, she had no reason to disbelieve me now and she acted exactly as I knew she would. Mother took Sherlock out for a walk on the grounds, to the bee hives—he loved to watch the bees—where she could talk with him safely in private.   
    
“It was an unforgivable lie in and of itself. Sherlock’s animosity towards me is more than understandable.   
    
“I was alone in the house, by design, when Father came home. I cornered him in his study and informed him that Sherlock and I knew what he was doing and that we would expose him if he didn’t get out. I commanded him to lie to Mother. I told him never to contact us for anything.   
    
“Depraved though he undoubtedly was, neither I nor Sherlock could be bribed or cowed by false threats, and even he wouldn’t act violently against his children. He and Mother had a nasty row that night, and he was gone.”   
    
“Where did he go?” I asked.   
    
“Presumably back to El Salvador,” Mycroft answered. I said nothing further but he saw the consternation anyway, or anticipated it. “Yes, Dr. Watson, back to El Salvador, where he could continue his crimes against humanity.”   
    
“You had another reason for letting him go,” said Lestrade. It wasn’t a question.   
    
“The politics,” Mycroft admitted. “Exposure of my Father would have caused a national scandal, since his influence was working on official channels, which involved our government to a certain degree. With the government as it was at that time it would have lead to a war. I had three options. I could allow my father to continue supplying arms to El Salvadore. I could begin a war that would cost still more lives. Or I could… kill the man. I took the only course I could possibly live with. But it was only the lesser of several evils, and has cost me many sleepless nights since.” He began drinking his brandy and fell silent. Lestrade stared at the molding along the wall, stricken. I stared at Sherlock, waiting.   
    
Minutes went by. Sherlock was too much in shadow for me to really see his face, but I could tell he was struggling with something.   
    
“Three Brutus’s,” he murmured darkly, calling attention to himself, “conspiring together over drinks and childhood stories.”   
    
“We’re hardly planning to stab you in the back, Sherlock.” I said. I was light in the head. My glass was empty. Mycroft’s brandy was excellent. I thought Sherlock could probably use some.   
    
“You would like some brandy with your co-conspirators, Sherlock?” asked Mycroft, pointedly reminding Sherlock that we were on his side. Lying for  _him._    
    
“I wouldn’t,” he answered shortly. “I would like to go home. I understand that’s permissible now?” He wasn’t forgiving his brother today.   
    
“The numbers back me up, Sherlock,” Mycroft said softly, in the voice of a man who has said the same thing many times before without a hope of being heard.   
    
Sherlock ignored his brother and looked instead at me.   
    
“Home,” he commanded. I shook the hands of Mycroft and Lestrade, thanking them. I noticed, as I walked out, that they were standing close together in a big room. As the door swung closed I saw Lestrade put a hand on Mycroft’s arm.   
    
And then home we went. Sherlock left without a backward glance at his worried brother.   
    
Baker Street was freezing. The gas had been turned off all night and  morning. I cranked it up. Sherlock took a shower. I had tea ready for him when he reemerged. His hair was a tousled wet mess. He had put on clean pajamas and his gray dressing gown. He didn’t lock himself in his room as I’d been dreading, but dropped onto the couch and sipped his tea.   
    
“It was the logical thing to do,” I said, wasting no time. I was tired and feeling sick. I was all out of patience. “What other choice did Mycroft have?”   
    
“He had the choice to give others the choice,” Sherlock answered slowly. “He made a decision for the entire family, for the entire country, when he let my father go.”     
    
“The world is unfair, and it upsets you,” I said irritably, unreasonably. I needn’t have been so short with him. He had given up. He cracked open, finally, slamming his hand against the coffee table.   
    
“No!” he shouted at me. “The world is idiotic and emotional and it upsets me! The world kills itself for the sake of retaining its own stupidity, and it bloody upsets me! People aren’t all morons, John, they’re lazy. They defer to systems that only work properly forty percent of the time and ignore the massive margin of error for their own convenience! And intelligent people like Mycroft, like myself, have to make up for those errors! People have to die for those errors! Murder for the sake of leisure,” he snarled this last part, like a kicked dog back into a corner.   
    
I had no words for him. Not right away. He had to sit through ninety seconds of silence while I reeled.   
    
Imagine you are standing on a hill looking down on the surface of a high plateau. Below you are ten million people. Ninety percent of them are walking around blindfolded, stumbling, unaware every second of their lives where they are in relation to the edge. Ten percent are sitting in arm chairs, conversing, with their hands held up to the sides of their faces so they can’t see the others falling and dying. The people who are blindfolded are smiling, and chatting, and falling in love. They don’t complain when their mothers trip over the side, when their sons are bumped off by jostling shoulders. They smile. They laugh. You call warnings down to them. You tell them to watch their steps, to take off the blindfolds, it only makes sense.   
    
They call you a psychopath. They hate you.   
    
I rubbed my tired eyes, tight in the chest.   
    
“Sherlock, what do you need?” I had to know.   
    
“I require nothing, at the moment, John,” cold as winter.   
    
“What do you  _want_? What can I give you?” I was asking for my sake more than for his. He had managed without me his whole life. He could get through alone again, if he was careful with the drugs. But  _I_  couldn’t bear that thought. I couldn’t think of him strung out in some hotel. So I pushed. I was insistent. I crouched before him, inches away, holding myself up with the couch cushion below his knees. “Sherlock…”   
    
“I don’t want your forgiveness, John,” he said. “And I won’t apologize. I don’t want to change.”   
    
“What  _do_  you want, damn it! What?” I flipped the coffee table over and kicked it. I was beyond reason. I only wanted to  _help_ and he was being an  _idiot._     
    
He stared at me like I was an undiscovered species.   
    
“You,” he said softly, “have the unparalleled ability to continually surprise me.” He fisted his fingers into my lapels and hauled me into him, crushing my mouth with his. I was out of breath already with frustration, the kiss made my vision darken I was so dizzy. I closed my eyes to make the room stop spinning. I wrapped my hand around the back of his head so he couldn’t pull away; gasping the air I needed from his mouth and through my nose.   
    
We scrambled madly to fit ourselves comfortably onto the sofa. Layering was our only option really, so I sat on him, pinned him down by the shoulders with my hands. He was warm beneath me, and yielding. He held onto me like a drowning man. I kissed him until I tasted warm salt, then I broke away and gasped his name.   
    
He wasn’t crying exactly, but his voice was wrecked and tears were spilling over his thin cheeks. I saw what a mess he was.   
    
“What—?”   
    
“I lied,” he choked. “I wish you would forgive me. Even if I don’t change—even if I  _can’t_ —.”   
    
I kissed him again to bring back the silence.   
    
“Do your worst,” I told him. He laughed. It was a jagged, heartfelt thing, unlike any sound I’d heard from him before. His hands came up to my face, long cool fingers and hot palms.   
    
“I have done,” he said, and pulled me down.   
    
We spent two nights in Baker Street and then went back to Poldhu Bay and the case of the murdered family of Tregennis. Wrapping all the pieces back together was the work of an afternoon. Dr. Leon Sterndale was an amateur expert in the exotic poisons used by African tribes. He had brought certain samples back, many of which were psychoactive. Among them was  _Radix Pedis Diabolia;_  'Devil’s Foot Root’. It takes a powder form, but if combusted turns into a poisonous gas that is often deadly if inhaled, causing it’s victims to hallucinate horrors in their final moments. It also works on the lungs to deprive the brain of oxygen, so those unlucky enough to survive prolonged exposure suffer massive and permanent damage. Mortimer Tregennis had learned of the drug from Dr. Sterndale through a casual, but unlucky, conversation. He stole a discreet quantity and used it to kill his sister and drive his brothers mad.   
    
It was for money.   
    
Dr. Sterndale, secretly engaged to Brenda Tredannick, had recognized the poison and known that it could have only been Mortimer. He took a most fitting revenge. He was long gone back to Africa by the time we returned. Sherlock was not particularly upset by it, and I can’t say I minded myself.   
    
Mycroft called me in the evening to ask after Sherlock. I was unsurprised to hear Lestrade’s gruff voice in the background.   
    
I…I think that must be the end. Yes. That’s everything.   
    
Obviously I can never publish this account. I don’t know what to do with it, actually.   
 

xXx

 

“Delete it,” said Sherlock’s satin voice in John’s ear. His lips brushed gently at the delicate skin there. “It’s done its job. You feel better. I can tell by the set of your shoulders and the shake in your left hand. It only trembles when you are feeling relieved.” He nipped at the offending appendage. “And I’d rather not leave fodder for the blackmailers.”   
    
“It’s password protected, Sherlock.”   
    
“It would be safer stuffed in a sock. Erase it.”

xXx

 

_from the personal blog of John H. Watson_    
 _March 29 th, 2013. Last saved: 3:26 A.M. _  
 

_This post has been deleted by the user._


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